IBM is building on the release of its four-month-old free enterprise search product OmniFind Yahoo Edition with a new version that adds new languages and usability improvements.

The new release adds support for over a dozen languages including French, German, Spanish and Italian. Other features include simplified customisation, closer integration with applications and more refined searching through metadata and secondary searches.

The December release of the free software was hailed by some watchers as a breakthrough in getting more organisations to try out business-class search
capabilities that can identify and retrieve programs and files from a wide variety of sources. IBM said 16,000 users have downloaded the code and some have already fulfilled IBM’s plans for the release by upgrading to paid-for versions with deeper
capabilities.

“We’ve seen customers moving up the stack to products that sell for upwards of six-figure sums," said Aaron Brown, program director for content discovery and
search at IBM.

“Many users find that free search programs [such as those from Google or Microsoft] are a good starting point but then challenges arise because of breadth of content types in enterprises. The bigger problem is how content is organised in the enterprise where you tend to have many more silos than on the web. Having lots of links and authority rankings simply don’t work in finding documents that are really relevant.”

Brown added that IBM is also building up partners that are developing OmniFind, which is based on the open-source Lucene indexing library and has open APIs for developers to integrate new capabilities. Security firm Tetrad Digital Integrity, for example, is building an information risk and compliance program using OmniFind.

Brown said that some hardware makers are also looking at the possibility of OmniFind Yahoo Edition appliances.

Other firms are looking at ways to integrate more elements of internet usage. Search giant Google was last week linked with taking a stake in Chinese web browser maker Maxthon, raising again suggestions of a tightly coupled web browser with search. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation said it is testing a version of the Firefox browser that includes social networking tools.